Are there really secrets that profitable sports gamblers know that you don’t? The answer is yes, there are some secrets you probably need to know.
And you’re going to learn some of these secrets in this article. Once you learn the five secrets listed in this article, it’s up to you whether you choose to use them or not.
Just because you know the secrets, it doesn’t mean that sports gambling is easy. Knowing the sports gambling secrets is one thing, but using them in a smart way requires some work. Put these secrets about sports gambling into action today.
1 – Nobody Wins Them All
What percentage of wagers do you think that winning sports gamblers win? Do you think they win all of their bets? Do you think they win 75% of their wagers?
Would you believe that most successful sports gamblers only win around 55% of their wagers? And a few only win 53 to 54% of their wagers.
These numbers can be a little bit misleading, because there are different types of sports wagers available. These numbers are for sports gamblers that make spread wagers. If you make mostly moneyline wagers, you can make a profit winning less than 50% of your bets and lose overall even if you win 75% of your bets.
The key point here is that you’re not going to win all of your bets as a sports gambler, and that the number of wagers you win doesn’t really mean anything. The important thing to focus on is how much money you’re making overall.
If you’re not a winning sports gambler, pick one type of wager to focus on. If you’re focusing on spread wagers, you need to learn how to win 53% or more of them to make money in the long run. This is a good place to start.
Once you learn how to handicap games and find value often enough to beat the spread in the long run, you can start looking for moneylines and run lines and totals that offer value. But don’t try to do everything at once.
2 – Don’t Let Results Bias Ruin Your Long-Term Results
You make a bet on a sporting event and win. Does this mean that it was a good wager? Most sports gamblers only look at the result of a game to judge whether they made a good bet or not.
This is a little bit tricky because your overall results are what matters. But you can’t assume you made a smart wager just because you won a single game, or even a small group of games.
For example, you bet on the under in a game at 46 points.
The home team is leading 30 to 15 and has the ball inside the 10 with one minute to play. Instead of trying to score, they kneel and run out the clock. You win the wager, so you’re happy.
But does this mean that you made a smart value wager? It might mean that you did, but you have to evaluate the entire game to make this determination. What happened in the rest of the game?
Most sports gamblers just look at the result of the game and their wager. They don’t go back and evaluate the game again. They spend all of their time evaluating upcoming games and don’t compare how they evaluated a game to how the game actually played out.
You do need to learn how to evaluate upcoming games, but a big part of this is evaluating a game, then going back and comparing your evaluation with what happened in the game.
When you have a large number of wagers and their results, you start getting a better picture of your overall handicapping ability. But short-term results can make you believe that you’re doing a good job when you’re still going to end up losing in the long run.
3 – Value or No Value, the Only Question
When you evaluate sporting events and look at the lines that you can use to place wagers, you’re looking for something called value. Value is when you evaluate a game and find a line that doesn’t agree with your evaluation.
If you do this and you evaluate more games correctly, then you’ll make a long-term profit. But it’s not easy to find value and evaluate games correctly.
The way that I handicap games is to predict a final score. This isn’t the only way to handicap sporting events, but it’s the system that works best for me. Over the years, I’ve gotten much better at predicting scores, but I still miss by a large margin often.
When I predict a score, it’s easy to look at the lines and see if there’s any value. If I predict a final score of 24-14 on a football game and a team is favored by 7, there’s value if I’m right. And even when I’m off by a little, I can still win.
Start thinking in terms of value when you handicap sporting events. In the end, finding value is the only way you’re going to make a profit gambling on sports. Every time you evaluate a game and place a wager, look back after the game to see if you made the right decisions and see where you can do a better job finding value in the future.
4 – Home Teams Until You’re a Winner
In almost every sporting event, there’s a home team and a visiting or road team. This gives you two teams to place a wager on. But a mistake that most losing sports gamblers make is considering the road team for a wager.
On the surface, this seems like you’re cutting your betting options in half. But it’s too easy to make a mistake when you place a wager on a road team.
Experienced sports gamblers can place wagers on road teams when they find value, but until you learn how to find home teams that offer value and make money on these teams, you need to stop betting on visiting teams.
Continue evaluating games the way you have been and keep working on improving your handicapping skills. But for now, only place wagers when you find value on home teams. You’re still going to have a challenge winning over time, but you’re going to have the best chance because you’re using the advantages that home teams have.
5 – You Need a Huge Bankroll to Win Much
You’re not going to make much money gambling on sports risking $100 or less per game, even if you’re a good handicapper. You can make a little money, but there aren’t enough games that offer true value to make a lot of money.
For example, let’s say you’re winning 60% of your spread wagers and are betting $110 on each game. You’re able to find 10 games every week to place wagers on. This is just about as good as any sports gambler can expect to do in the long run.
You risk a total of $1,100 on the 10 games, and on the six games you win, you get $1,260 back. This is a profit of $160 for the week. Winning $160 is great, but there’s no way that this can be considered good money.
Even if you risk $550 on each game, your weekly profit is only $800. This is closer to good money, but it’s still not setting the world on fire.
This shows why you have to be able to make larger wagers to make good money. But you need a big bankroll in order to be able to make larger wagers. I recommend making bets between 1% and 3% of your total bankroll to stay safe.
This means that even if you’re a great sports gambler, you need $50,000 to $100,000 in your bankroll to safely make bets large enough to make decent money. Of course you can get started with less, but you need to build your bankroll as quickly as you can.
Conclusion
Most of the time when you see a title about secrets, you learn that there aren’t really any secrets. It’s just a way to get you to read the article. But in sports gambling, there are some lesser-known tips that most gamblers don’t know.
The biggest secret in sports gambling is that you need a huge bankroll to win a lot of money because even the best gamblers only have a small edge. You’re not going to win every bet you make, so you have to use a long-term approach to gambling. Don’t make the mistake of letting short-term bias cost you money in the long run.
Michael Stevens
Michael Stevens has been researching and writing topics involving the gambling industry for well over a decade now and is considered an expert on all things casino and sports betting. Michael has been writing for GamblingSites.org since early 2016. …
